As the INC is preparing for a conference on search engines, titled The Society of the Query, research intern Dennis Deicke is delving deep into search engine theory. His book reviews can be read on the preliminary conference site www.networkcultures.org/query. Dennis has published his first review, which covers David Gugerli’s Suchmaschinen, Die Welt als Datenbank. The review can be read here.

part 1

Session 2: Search Engines and Power

Theo Röhle – Dissecting the Gatekeepers

Theo Röhle is a PhD candidate in media culture at Hamburg University. His dissertation seeks to establish Actor-Network-Theory (ANT) and Foucauldian concepts of power within search engine research.

Where does the power of search engines exist? One position of power is established in everyday discourse through images of anxiety and fear. Giving power a face however, tends to obscure the complex relations underlying it. As ANT suggests, there is no fixed source of power, just a temporary stabilization of a network.

Defining the actors in the power network, Röhle locates the search engine as intermediary between user and transparency, and between webmaster and attention. As Google enters the picture, it diverts all actions through its own network. From an ANT perspective, this makes it the obligatory passage point for both user and webmaster.

Read the rest of this entry »

This Saturday, November 8, I had the pleasure of attending the well organized World-Information Institute conference Deep Search: The Digital Future of Finding Out in Vienna, Austria. With Deep Search, conference editors Konrad Becker and Felix Stalder set out to address the social and cultural dimension as well as the information politics and societal implications of search. An impressive line-up of eight speakers, divided over the sessions ‘Search Engines and Civil Liberties’, ‘Search Engines and Power’ and ‘Making Things Visible’, promised to make it an information-dense and interesting day.

As this will be a rather full report, I will post it in two parts. Be sure to keep an eye on the conference website, as the organizers promise to make a full video archive of the conference speeches available soon.

Keynotes

Paul Duguid – The World According to Grep: Both Sides of the Search Revolution

After a timely start and a word of welcome, Konrad Becker introduced the first speaker of the event: Paul Duguid, former consultant at Xerox PARC (1989-2001) and author of The Social Life of Information (Harvard Business School Press, 2000). Currently, Duguid teaches History of Information and Quality of Information at the University of California in Berkeley.

Read the rest of this entry »